Girls Basketball | Chippewa has been doing it with defense

Wednesday

Mar 13, 2019 at 4:15 PMMar 13, 2019 at 6:09 PM

DOYLESTOWN — There are only so many facets of the game of basketball you can control.

Sometimes your shots don't fall or the calls just don't go your way.

But, as Chippewa's girls basketball team has quickly found out, defense is something you can always dictate — something it hopes to continue Thursday at 3 p.m. when it takes the court in a Division III state semifinal against undefeated Waynesville.

"As the old saying goes, defense wins championships," Chipps longtime coach Denny Schrock said. "Obviously, you want to put a lot of points on the board, if you can, but going into this weekend we're hoping that our defense is going to pay dividends."

Thus far, it has.

Chippewa has been holding teams under 35 points a game this winter but, more importantly, has found a variety of ways to stop teams.

From stringing together just enough positive possessions on the defensive end to hold off an explosive Loudonville squad, to erasing an 18-point deficit to an Elyria Catholic squad that has weapons at just about every position, the Chipps have been darn good at it.

And it all starts with finding out everything on the team they’re facing.

They not only want to know what offense they run, but how they set up, who they need to key-in on, etc.

"We have really bought into it," Schrock said. "We work every day on defense against sets that the other team is running. We want to know where their cutters are going. We want to know where their picks are going to be and if we have to close out and who we have to close out on. Our scouts really set us up well and then we watch film and go with it."

Led by hard-nosed guards in seniors Bailey Clark and Bailee Ferrell, Chippewa put together on the greatest comebacks in county history to earn its third-ever state berth.

The Chipps play up top, along with that of the athletic Celina Koncz flying around the court and post Grace Lindquist protecting the rim and ripping down key rebounds, gave Elyria Catholic — and its talented point guard Faith Williams — fits in the second half as the Chipps scrapped their traditional man-to-man for a zone trap.

But it more than just one or two players keeping the pressure up.

"It took everybody," Ferrell said. "Once we started putting the pressure on them with our defense, they were turning the ball over and that's what we needed.

"We knew that Faith was a good ballhandler, but we felt we could pressure the other guards to turn it over. Our defense is fast and we knew, with tough defense, they would have a hard time getting the ball to the hole."

To Schrock, that’s just the Chippewa way.

"A lot of it is the types of kids I have," he said. "Our girls at halftime (of the regional final), particularly Bailey Clark, said that we were not going to lose that game. She set the tone for the other girls to follow and we've had girls like that step up all year.

"Once you get a couple of stops and then you feed off of that, then it becomes contagious. That's what it did against Loudonville and Elyria Catholic."

The Chipps are going to need that same effort, and then some, if they want to advance to Saturday's state title game.